Human Soup
A truck transforms me into human soup. Sadness, flowers, bye.
Or, not to offend our species, let’s say a laboratory mouse was hit and transformed into soup (good thing they have no union to defend them).
The question is:
It is not “Oracle”, nor “Firebase”, the king of databases.
I propose that the king of the databases will be the database that can recreate the mouse.
Not a clone, using 70’s technology. Not a “Dolly” mouse.
Nope.
I mean to recreate the same mouse that turned into soup. With the same memories. The same skin. Aged.
Each cell with its own genome. With genes and 98% of non-gene information, precise, in each cell of each organ.
This probably might be the same mouse.
With the same memories. The same day’s ones.
And now?
Questions just begin:
1. How about adding a little more collagen, since we are rebuilding from scratch?
2. Why not look at the backup and rebuild the “20-years-old” version (at mouse age)?
3. In the case of recovering the “20-years-old” version, the memory after the 20 years goes away altogether. The “20-years-old” shyness. The “20-years-old” lack of knowledge.
4. What, then, we might want would be all from the 20-year-old-epoch minus the lack of knowledge?
That would be a new “soup” of information. Solidly materialized. Real. Ready.
Neither Oracle nor Firebase.
The king of the databases is still undiscovered.
But it has its place marked, already. Let’s doubt while we can.
Warning: boring mathematical area below.
Go ahead only if you want to know about storing ourselves in the cloud.
I do not mean to store genes — that would be easy; they do not change, they’re only 20 thousand.
I want to store the interactions with the environment.
Genome-environment interactions.
These interactions change the non-gene 98% other parts of our genome.
For each cell.
Can we do it?
There are 3 billion a, t, c, g bases within each genome.
9 zeros (3,000,000,000).
This is nothing. Ridiculously small. The cloud swallows all this zeroes of data as a breeze.
Now our body. Our body has 10 trillion cells.
13 zeros.
Each of these cells containing its own unique 3 billion a, t, c, g pairs.
13 + 9 = 21 zeros.
Piece of cake still.
A breeze to the capacity of our clouds today. Imagine tomorrow.
21 zeros guard the entire human genome of each of all our cells, each one with all its variations and interactions recorded throughout life, throughout the body of a human being.
All this ex-tre-me-ly compressible.
So much compressible that I do not doubt it would fit inside a 21st century pen-drive.
Our red blood producing cells are very repetitive. As are the ones from the liver. From the kidney. We are a lot compressible, can we deny?
(As a jpeg-like compressed image, would someone perceive our “pixels” — that’s a good another topic, duly noted).
But anyway, we do not even have to compress “ourselves”. The cloud swallows 21 zeros of uncompressed information smiling. Without a burp.
Once a year: two more zeros. (100 years, 100 “pictures of you”).
We are going so easy that we could take a “snapshot” of our entire genome from all our cells every 5 minutes - and that would add nothing more than a few zeros of information:
5 minutes, 12 times / hour, 24 hours / day, 365 days / year.
365 * 24 * 12 = 5 more zeros (one hundred thousand).
26 zeros to take a picture of your entire genome from all your cells every 5 minutes.
Every millisecond?
Sure!
A thousand, times 60, times 5. Only 5 more zeros. 6 to ensure.
32 zeros.
Every millisecond of you kept forever.
The problem happens to be “bandwidth”, whoever subscribes to cable internet knows well. How to convey all this (21 zeros every millisecond)?
Soon this will also be easy. While it is not, we can “save ourselves” only every 5 minutes. Or every year. Who cares?
It matters to know that we will have our “photos”.
Of the whole genome of each of our cells. In the cloud.
Size is nothing. Even uncompressed.
We only have to measure.
Well, the genome is measured, already. Impossible is not.
“Right there” — can you see? — is the ability to measure the genome of all our cells — not only one cell.
And quickly: say, every 5 minutes Or every year at least.
This recording would include any and all marked interaction of each of our cell’s genome with the environment along the years passed.
Who says this does not include our memories?
Memories are physical.
It’s not because you can not catch them (can’t you?) that they are not physical as much as a dime on the floor.
Myelin. Neurons. The geometry.
Geometry: if it becomes necessary to store geometry, many zeros it won’t add: let’s store geometry wherever we need it.
Without forgetting to store the tiny genome of our mitochondria, beautiful mitochondria, who derives from our mothers (all of them!), until our first mother 200,000 years ago in South Africa and region. Mitochondria with its tiny genome but whose power and ångströns precision that it coordinates easily impact our lives.
And so “we are” in the cloud.
Each year. Every 5 minutes. Every millisecond.
Is that it? How come?